


Her Best Friend's Girlfriend (and more)

by ap_aelfwine



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, F/M, Hogwarts Seventh Year, Kissing, Multi, Snogging, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 12:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ap_aelfwine/pseuds/ap_aelfwine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the lakeside, Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley discuss Dark Lords and their needs. (Seventh Year AU)</p>
<p>Translated by the author from his Irish-language story "Girseach a Cara Cléibh (agus níos mó)."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Best Friend's Girlfriend (and more)

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Girseach a Cara Cléibh (agus níos mó)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106873) by [ap_aelfwine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ap_aelfwine/pseuds/ap_aelfwine). 



> The characters and situations of the Harry Potter series are copyright J.K. Rowling. They may not be used or reproduced commercially without permission. The use of these characters and situations is not to be construed as challenge to said copyright. They are merely borrowed for this work of non-commercial fanfiction, from which the author derives no financial benefit.

It was a fine rainy day in Spring, and drops of rain were making dapples on the surface of the lake. The Giant Squid had gone below to sulk, or, if Luna Lovegood was right, to play noughts and crosses with the Merfolk. Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley were sitting together on a blanket in the shelter of an oak tree beside the lake. They were comfortably dry, as Hermione had augmented the branches with a minor water-repellent charm.

"My great-great-great grandfather killed one of the Malfoys here," Ginny said softly, "a fifth cousin or somesuch to the git we're acquainted with. I think it happened in 1661 or so. Somebody wrote that he gutted him like a trout. All Wizard's duels were fought with swords in those days, of course. Wand fights in the seventeenth century were nothing more than schoolboy brawls."

"Professor MacGonagall told me there was still a fencing instructor here when she was a student in the Forties."

"Oh, sport fencing... It's a nice little game and good exercise, if you like that sort of thing, but to tell the truth the moves are all wrong if you're fighting for your life with a sharp sword in hand and an enemy before you. And it's better training with a plain wooden stick than with a foil if there's real combat in your future. You can only cast a couple of small spells through a piece of wire." There was a small pretty smile on her face.

It was clear Ginny was waiting for a response from Hermione. She hadn't a word. "Hm," she said at last, a small weak interrogative sound.

"Sword spells are fascinating. They're not much like wand spells, really. It's a whole separate branch of magic, as distinct as Charms or Transfiguration. You have to learn languages to use them, as it's not enough to simply memorise words and phrases. Latin alone won't suffice, of course. You need Old Norse, Old and Middle Irish, Old and Middle English, two strange old-fashioned dialects of German... And now Flitwick is teaching Harry and me a couple of languages that Muggles don't even know were written down, ancient languages that got their words relating to iron from Hittite. You'd truly fall under the spell, my dear, if you were studying those arts."

A part of Hermione's mind was very curious. There were manuals of Wizarding swordplay in the Restricted Section, but they were under very strong wards, the sort that not even she thought were worth breaking simply to find out a few pieces of trivia that were of no particular use to her. Another part of her was praying that her friend would start talking about anything else on the face of the Earth, about Charms or Ancient Runes or even Quidditch.

_About anything at all, O Lord, even her sex life with Harry,_ she begged, making an agnostic's hopeless prayer. _Not that I have any interest in my best friend or in beautiful Ginny as lovers, of course._

There was something dark inside sweet Ginny, the pretty little sister of her late dear friend, something that had woke when they were all fighting for their lives in the Ministry building, something dark that had never slept again. Last year, with only a few tears in her eyes, she'd drunk her brother's blood from her palms. _"Your blood's too dear a fluid to be wasted on the dirt, my brother," she said. And then, "Ron, my own brother, I swear on your murdered bones beneath my hand, before God and the Devil, that I myself will end the lives of the Lestrange brothers."_

After that, Ginny had collapsed keening on Harry's shoulder. The two of them had been going out for a month already at the time. _I was very happy for them. It seemed that Ron was seeing his best mate and his little sister together and was learning how to be a good boyfriend. He was being kinder to me, more polite, more thoughtful. I understood from when we were only kids that Harry would never be mine, that I was his sidekick, practically one of the lads. I was so happy that he was with Ginny and not Romilda Vane or some other jealous bitch. Harry and Ginny, myself and Ron... a big happy Weasley family, that's what I thought was in store for us. Oh, well, I'd be content enough as Auntie Hermione to their kids. Maybe I should go for a professor? It's an important job, isn't it? Professor MacGonagall has a pretty nice life, doesn't she? Doesn't she?_ Hermione's body shook slightly. She couldn't be crying in front of Ginny. She'd be sympathetic, and she'd ask questions. _I can't tell her my thoughts._

Ginny was quiet, looking out over the lake. Was she thinking about Harry, who was training right now with Professors Snape and Dumbledore? It was likely. Or perhaps she was thinking about her own training sessions.

Snape had left the Death Eaters a half-year ago. He'd appeared in the Hogwarts Infirmary one night with Lucius Malfoy's life blood on his hands and Narcissa Black, Malfoy's widow, in his arms. She'd been beaten nearly to death by her late husband.

That was a strange thing, Severus Snape as a fair teacher who was almost friendly, a man whom she saw walking in the gardens of Hogwarts with his beloved Narcissa. But it was stranger still to see Harry and Ginny, her two best friends, attending tutorials with both him and the Headmaster, tutorials they didn't talk about. Harry was teaching new spells to the DA, spells that were close to Cruciatus and Imperius, but just barely on the right side of the law.

From Harry's patient teaching Hermione now knew how to unbalance the body's energy streams. That was a magic as deadly as the Killing Curse, and faster to cast if you had the skill. She knew that Ginny always had a dagger or three, even under her pillow when she slept. The pretty little girl she'd first met on the train at the start of her Second Year, her worry for Harry and Ron as sharp as Hermione's own, was teaching unarmed combat to all Houses and Years.

She had two best friends, who were growing together like two trees planted side by side. And they were reaching out their limbs to bring Hermione in. She couldn't leave, even though she knew she was on a path to break the pacifism her poor dear parents had taught her from the cradle.

"Hermione, my friend? Look at me, please?" She couldn't look Ginny in the eyes. She was terrified that she'd see some savage ancestor staring out of her friend's eyes, a woad-painted barbarian warrior who'd hang the scalps of her enemies from the reins of her war Thestral. "Oh, love, am I so evil? Have I become so hard that you can't look me in the face? I'm sorry if I frighten you. Please, if you ever had kindness for me, or at least for our Harry..."

She couldn't deny Ginny. There was a trace of the wild ancestral warrior in her friend's pretty brown eyes, but there was far more kindness and friendship and something else. Hermione didn't understand what her friend intended until there were soft feminine lips on her own. "Would you care to give me a kiss, love?" Ginny whispered, even though there wasn't a single person there to hear but only the two of them. "Please, dearest friend of my heart?"

Again, she couldn't deny Ginny. She felt as if she should ask her some question about something, but her friend was so pretty, so kind, so steadfast and true... And when Hermione knew what she was doing, she was kissing Ginny, and Ginny was kissing her. Her friend's mouth was smooth as silk, sweet as honey, soft as butter, warm as a fine summer day at the shore. Hermione was sunk in her emotions, too sunk to think about rightness and propriety, about heterosexuality or lesbianism or bisexuality, about the relationship between Harry and Ginny, or about anything at all on the face of the world but how fine it was to be kissing such a lovely girl. _Surely Harry won't mind. Aren't we both his since we were only young girls?_ They were in each others' arms, kissing, tongue to tongue, rolling on the blanket.

There was a pause in the snogging. Hermione realised that Ginny was lying on her breast, a pretty smile on her face. A wave of guilt washed over her. "Oh, Harry, my dearest friend, what have I done to you?"

"I'm not Harry, love, but Ginny. Don't you realise that you're the only person in all the world whom we'd trust to brew us Polyjuice?"

"But... You're his girlfriend. I'm only his friend. And I've betrayed his trust!"

"You've not betrayed him. We discussed it ourselves, and decided I should be the one to talk with you. Harry loves you, and he loves me. And I love him, and I love you. And we were hoping our love might be returned." She giggled, a lovely sound. "From the evidence of your kisses, I'm thinking it is. Am I right?"

_Yes. Yes. Yes, it is. I love you both and I always will!_ But Hermione's rational mind had a grip on her tongue still. She couldn't say it. Her low self esteem broke in on her. "Is this because of R... because of your, your..."

"You have the right to say my brother's name, love, if anyone at all in the world does."

"Is this because of poor Ron, and because of your pity for me?"

"Not at all. It's because of us, because of the three of us. You're so very dear to Harry and me, Hermione. And do you know why Voldemort went bad? There's many's a Dark Lord who didn't, after all."

"I knew that, but I didn't know why." In every generation, there was a Dark Lord, that was something Hermione knew from her own research, although there wasn't any mention of them in History of Magic classes. As a general rule they stayed in the shadows, working for the balance of magic, doing hard things for the right reasons in desperate times. The story was always much the same with each Dark Lord. He, or sometimes she, was always a Wizard or Witch with great magical power, who'd grown up hard, in cruel circumstances that might have made them monstrous, but who remained firmly on the side of Good. It was far too simple to say that the Dark was Evil and the Light was Good. Voldemort was the only person who'd taken the title and not taken the office.

In time of war it was the Dark Lord's duty to protect the magic of the land. For instance, during the Civil War the Dark Lord William More had saved the Holy Thorn at Glastonbury from Cromwell's forces by hiding it under layer on layer of anti-Muggle wards. And during the Second World War the Dark Lord Hamish Maxwell had stopped Grindelwald's army when they tried to invade Britain. _Some say that's why the Muggle Wehrmacht never put Operation Sea Lion into action. And Dumbledore himself says he could never have beaten Grindelwald without Maxwell protecting the Home Front._

After her research Hermione had understood it wasn't unlikely that Harry would someday become a Dark Lord, due to the things the Dursleys had done to him in childhood, but she'd not understood how close her friend was to taking up the post. But now, listening to Ginny, she realised that they hadn't any other chance. _I hate to say it, but who other than a true Dark Lord_ could _defeat a Dark Lord gone bad?_

"Tom Riddle was a sort of an ascetic when he was young," Ginny said. "He was a celibate, even though he wasn't interested in taking Holy Orders, or indeed in having anything to do with any church or temple at all. If he'd had a religion I suppose it's possible he might have made a good priest, but he hadn't any. And when he met with the Darkness inside him, and him with nothing to keep his balance, he went mad."

"Oh?"

"A Dark Lord needs a Dark Lady. That's my part. After what happened back then with the damned Diary, the Darkness in me is as strong as what's in Harry. But a Dark Lady alone isn't enough. They need a Light Lady as well. And we were hoping, Harry and I, that, well, you might be our own Light Lady."

Hermione's throat was blocked. She couldn't get a single word out. At last, she managed to say "Ginny, love..."

"If you're not interested in a three-way relationship, Hermione, or if you're not interested in us as lovers, I'm sure we could find another woman. I hope we'll always be friends. That would be enough for me, really. I hope you'll forgive us, or at least that you'll forgive our Harry..." Ginny was shaking like a leaf in the wind. The warrior was gone and the little girl was back.

Hermione grabbed her friend's hand. "I'd forgive the two of you anything at all. Well, anything except if you left me single after just one sole gorgeous kiss like the one you just gave me. There can't be another woman in the whole wide world who'll love you and Harry the way I love you both." She kissed Ginny again.

Ginny's fingers were tangled in her hair. Her tongue was wrestling with Ginny's tongue. Suddenly she heard a male voice, a voice she knew well from six years together. "Well, love, I take it you've had a conversation with our Hermione. And I take it she's answered our question?" His eyes danced with laughter. Hermione thought that he'd never been so handsome in all their lives together, not even in the Great Hall at the Yule Ball, him in dress robes and pretty Parvati Patil glowing on his arm. He went to one knee at the edge of the blanket.

Hermione realised that her shirt was half opened. She felt a bit embarrassed. _But why? You had fantasies of being completely naked in front of Harry when you were only twelve years of age._ Instead of worrying about what he was seeing, she reached up and took him by the shirt-front. "Here's my answer for you, love," she said. She pulled him down to her, and she kissed her best and dearest male friend.

The three of them were very late to dinner that evening.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I wrote a fic with this same basic plot about eight years ago. 
> 
> I'd had thoughts of translating that story into Irish for quite a while, and I finally got round to doing it in the last week or so. But by the time I was done, I'd instead written a completely new fic in Irish, so I ended up having to translate that one to English instead. Assuming you didn't skip ahead to the end notes, you've just read the result.
> 
> It's kind of odd writing Seventh Year fanfic in a language that has only had official translations done for the _Philosopher's Stone_ book and a dubbed version of the _Chamber of Secrets_ movie.


End file.
